Quick Take
- Narration: Mark Elstob is an excellent fit for Gimlette’s literary travel writing, his voice carries the mixture of scholarly curiosity and wry English bewilderment that the prose requires.
- Themes: Island as world unto itself, the archaeology of piracy and migration, beauty coexisting with political collapse
- Mood: Eccentric and immersive, the kind of travel writing that makes you feel you have been somewhere genuinely strange
- Verdict: John Gimlette’s Madagascar is one of the most unusual travel books in recent memory, and Elstob’s narration makes 13 hours feel like a privilege rather than a commitment.
I finished The Garden of Mars on a Sunday afternoon when I should have been doing something productive, and I spent a few minutes afterward sitting with the particular feeling that comes from having been somewhere very far away without moving. Madagascar is one of those places that operates at a frequency slightly different from everything else, and John Gimlette has spent enough time there, and read deeply enough into its history, to understand why. The result is a book that is technically a work of travel writing but functions more like a very long, very learned conversation with someone who cannot stop finding things to be astonished by.
The title comes from a seventeenth-century French description of the island, which the colonial imaginers called the Great Island of Mars, a place so wild and impenetrable that its geography seemed not quite terrestrial. Gimlette travels to every corner of the island while simultaneously burrowing into its past, and the combination produces a book that moves laterally as well as forward. You are never quite sure whether a given chapter is going to resolve in the present or be drawn back into the sixteenth century, and that uncertainty is part of the book’s considerable pleasure.
The Island That Refuses to Behave Like an Island
Gimlette opens with the scale problem, and it is a good opening because it immediately establishes that Madagascar is not the animated animal kingdom of popular imagination but something far stranger. If stretched across Europe, the island would span from London to Algiers. Its road network is smaller than Jamaica’s. The first human settlement is estimated at only around 10,000 years ago, and the people who ultimately dominated were migrants from Borneo, approximately 3,700 miles in the wrong direction. These are not incidental facts. They are the key to everything else in the book.
The Borneo connection is one of the more extraordinary puzzles in human migration history, and Gimlette pursues it with the kind of patient, curious intelligence that distinguishes the best travel writing from mere tourism reporting. How did Austronesian peoples from Southeast Asia come to populate a large island off the eastern coast of Africa before the Bantu peoples from the continent’s mainland? The question takes Gimlette deep into the island’s plural origins, its languages, its music, and the layered syncretism of its spiritual practices.
Pirates, Sorcerers, and Political Collapse
One of the most vivid sections of the book concerns Madagascar’s seventeenth-century role as a pirate haven. This is not the romanticized piracy of popular culture but something more complicated, a period when the island’s strategic position, its political fragmentation, and its distance from effective European governance made it a genuinely useful refuge for those operating outside legal frameworks. Gimlette traces the descendants of some of these pirate communities and the legacies they left in local culture and bloodlines.
Reviewer Rick King, who read the book before traveling to Madagascar, notes that nothing can truly prepare you for the place, but that the book provides context for what lies beneath the visible surface. Reviewer Biltong lover went further, purchasing a physical copy after listening, because the density of detail demanded re-reading. That response captures something real about the book’s texture. Gimlette is writing for the second time as much as the first; the book rewards return.
Mark Elstob and the Literary Travel Register
Literary travel writing has a specific tonal register, curious, self-deprecating, learned without being pedantic, capable of moving between comedy and shock within a few sentences. Elstob understands this register and inhabits it naturally. He gives Gimlette’s prose exactly the kind of English bemusement it requires, never letting the wry observations tip into condescension and never letting the historical passages become lectures. The thirteen-hour runtime is the right length for this kind of immersive travel narrative, long enough to develop genuine intimacy with the place, short enough to sustain momentum.
The book’s treatment of Madagascar’s contemporary political instability, coups, riots, the grinding dysfunction of a state whose resources have been systematically extracted for two centuries, is woven into the travel narrative rather than separated from it. Gimlette meets politicians, militia members, and lepers without treating any of them as more or less important than the gemstone prospectors or the sorcerers. That democratic curiosity is the book’s deepest quality.
Who Should Listen and Who Should Skip
Listen if you love literary travel writing, particularly in the tradition of Ryszard Kapuscinski or Redmond O’Hanlon, writers who treat the place they are visiting as a subject deserving the same intellectual seriousness as a novel. Listen if you have any interest in Madagascar specifically, the Indian Ocean world, or the history of piracy and colonial extraction in the Southern Hemisphere. Skip if you want practical travel information or a straightforward historical narrative, this is a book that circles and spirals and doubles back, and it requires a reader willing to follow those movements.
Frequently Asked Questions
Does The Garden of Mars cover the entire island of Madagascar or focus on a specific region?
Gimlette explicitly sets out to visit every corner of the island, and the book follows through on that intention. Different chapters focus on different regions, the highlands, the coasts, the remote interior, while the historical sections roam across the island’s entire four centuries of documented human contact.
How much of the book is contemporary travel versus historical research?
The two strands are interwoven throughout rather than separated into distinct sections. A chapter might begin in a contemporary market town and end three centuries earlier with pirates or Merina kings. The historical research is substantial but always grounded in a specific place Gimlette has physically visited.
Is this a good listen for someone preparing to travel to Madagascar, or is it too literary for practical purposes?
Reviewer Rick King specifically found it valuable preparation before visiting, providing context for the cultural currents visible beneath the surface. It will not help with logistics, but it will give you a much richer frame for what you are seeing. A practical travel guide can be supplementary.
How does Mark Elstob handle the Malagasy and French names and terminology throughout?
Elstob navigates the unfamiliar terminology with confidence. Madagascar’s linguistic heritage is a complex mixture of Austronesian, Bantu, and French influences, and Elstob’s handling of it is one of the markers of a narrator who has clearly prepared the material rather than sight-reading it.
